President Tom
Gray called the meeting to order at 9:03 PM in the Cole Assembly Room

In a
continuation from the last meeting, Tom presented a potential form to be used
to track Individual Reform projects. At
the beginning of each year student senate members would be required to fill out
the form listing a project or goals they want to undertake for the year.

The initial
discussion centered on whether it would make sense for senate members to fill
out the forms for the remaining of the semester. Some senators worried that this would not be feasible with only
three months remaining and that the idea of the reform projects is really long
term. Furthermore many thought the
reform projects would be more meaningful and effective if they were implemented
at the beginning of the school year.

The
discussion then shifted toward issues of implementation. Everyone seemed to agree that at least in principle
that actually writing down your goals gets you to do something. Senators also questions whether there
should be deadline about when the forms needed to be submitted by as well as
deadlines for the completion of the project.
The issue was also raised whether a committee should oversee these projects,
as people will often say they will do something but then chose not to. A suggestion was made that there should be
repercussions for not carrying out a project.
However many senate members felt this was going a little too far because
many senators already have substantial time commitments just by being on their
respective committees. A suggestion was
made that perhaps certain undefined positions such as class presidents be
required to carry out a project. Steve
Ruckman said that he would be willing to draft such a resolution and bring it
to the next meeting.

In the
midst of this discussion senators brought up the fact that the SGO doesn’t
really enforce any of its policies.
Individual members as well as the body as a whole say that they are
going to do things but stuff never gets done.
Part of this problem results because of the lag between meetings. Thus a proposal was made to both change the
attendance policy and the frequency of the Student Senate meetings.

Motion: A motion was made and seconded to change the
number of unexcused absences from Student Senate meetings from 3 to 2. The motion passed unanimously. The corresponding secretary will get stricter
about enforcing the attendance policy.
It was also decided that the Senate would meet again in two weeks on February
21st.

Tom next
reminded the senate that he was still working on a wish list that will be sent
to the Alumni. He said if people have
further suggestions that they should email him. A few suggestions were presented and Tom added them to the list.

Eric
Budish next brought up the fact that the school computer network is
pathetically slow especially access to the World Wide Web. Eric suggested that perhaps we could suggest
that the administration improves the WWW access with the surplus capital
campaign money. Tom and Daniel explained
that currently we use UMASS to access the Internet who in turn feed off of
MIT. The question was raised why we
couldn’t have our own lines that many less prestigious colleges have their own
lines and a slow Internet is bad for the school’s image. Tom also believed that the school is
waiting for the next generation technology and also they first need to improve
the ancient administrative computer network, which will take years and lots of
money. Someone commented however that
they thought this issue was raised at the last Trustee meeting because the
professors are also fed up. Tom said
he would investigate this issue further.

Josh
Machao next presented revised numbers about the resources such as laundry and
vending machines in the dorms. Many
senators expressed concern over the disparity of resources but acknowledged
that we cannot take action until we invite Stan Adams from physical plant to
one of our meetings to find out what is feasible. As in the last meeting the discussion revolved around the need
to have more dryers then washers, as the dryers take twice as long and slow
down the process and having more access to vending machines. However some Senators questioned whether
this was really worth pursuing if many of the changes are not feasible. Adding more dryers doesn’t improve the
personal lives of students. It does
improve structural and living situations but with limited resources we might
need to decide what is our real priority.

The final
item of business was a presentation by Andrew Doss, a freshman about creating a
morale commission. The goal of such a
body would be to improve school spirit and would operate as a separate entity
from social council and the SGO but would at the same time collaborate with
them. Andrew presented the example of
the Zoo crew at Lafayette College where people pay twenty dollars a year to be
a member. Everyone who joins gets a Zoo
crew t-shirt and goes together to various events to support the school. The idea would be that even if there were
only ten people in the group each one of them could take two of their friends
with them to an event and attendance would increase dramatically. Senators expressed their approval of this
idea however many noted that we have to be careful not to create a further
divide between athletics and non-athletics.
Many felt that if this is to be implemented we need to increase
attendance at all types of events such as concerts, plays etc. and not just
athletic events. A few senators
commented that school spirit starts with athletics because that is where spirit
can most easily be seen. Again this
could alienate people but if a sense of community is created that might be good. The idea would be to get musicians going
to athletic events and athletes going to music events. Some senators also commented that things
could get worse before they get better but that this is a good idea and Andrew
should be given the opportunity to give it a shot as long as it is an across
the board organization promoting school spirit at all types of events.